Tuesday, April 19, 2011

My mother and grandmother are coming to visit me in July! Isn't that exciting? I am being very dictatorial about their visit. They are only going to be here for a week, so I have been thinking very hard about what the best things are to see in Vietnam if one only has a week to spend.

And so of course Hoi An has come out at the top of my list. It is perfect for all levels of mobility, perfectly welcoming and full of wonderful Vietnamese treasures. We spent four days in Hoi An on our short tour at the beginning of January, and I realise that I have never written about it here, yet. The highlight for me was the tour of the ruins at My Son. In New Zealand all of the buildings and structures are a couple of hundred years old, tops. So we kiwis get excited when presented with very old things.

The structures at My Son were built between the 4th and 14th centuries AD. Our tour guide told us that after the Champa were defeated by the Vietnamese in around the 14th century, the site was abandoned, and nobody really knew much of it's existence. Until, sometime in the 19th century it was stumbled upon by a hunting Frenchman, who brought archeologists to study the site. I don't know how reliable our tour guide was, but I love the idea of the Frenchman picking his way through the dense Vietnamese forest - probably in pursuit of a tiger or something like that, and then coming across a whole lot of beautiful brick towers rising out of the jungle.

I made this video today - almost by accident, really. I was uploading some different videos to youtube, and I saw an option to 'make' a video using a youtube video editor thingy, so I uploaded some of my Hoi An photos, and voila:

It ends rather abruptly, but that's what you get with free videos! Enjoy.